We found the fields of the spreadsheets of the results of their last study were already concatenated: Total Research, Federal Research, Endowment Assets, Annual Giving, National Academy Members, Faculty Awards, Doctorates Granted, Postdoctoral Appointees, and SAT/ACT range.

The messy, real-world data spreadsheet file had to be modified into the data tables Jolicharts expects. Only few changes were made.

Even if this step is very important when you use data that aren’t designed to be processed, it is not always compulsory. More and more data is already well shaped for analytic tools (like, for example, most of the data you directly export from software or web apps).

STEP 3 – Uploading Data on Jolicharts

Because all the data was on the same Excel sheet, everything was quickly loaded in only one “Adding a data source” click.

STEP 4 – Design Charts

As usual, charts were made with drag and drops. We decided to always filter the only ten first results on each chart. It makes the Dashboard more synthetic and understandable at first glance.

Sharing is caring! You can also choose to share this dashboards with your colleagues, enable them to have real-time insights on your creation in order to get some feedback of your work.

STEP 5 – Design the dashboard

Some colors, icons and source explanation were added, to give it a more pleasant overview and also some visual aid.

Tip: Once you defined the look of one chart-bloc (font size, colors) feel free to copy-paste this nice chart block through your dashboard and then change the visualization.

STEP 6 – Share the dashboard

One click was enough to share our dashboards online. Here is our result, go and see by yourself!

It took less than 2 hours to build this dashboard. Of course, it is not the first time I was making visualizations with Jolicharts, but if you know already precisely what kind of visualization you want to have as a result, Jolicharts is the tool that helps you turn ideas into reality.

Why you should use Jolicharts instead of a good old pivot table in Excel to generate your charts? Not clear to you? Here are some key benefits to one of the most frequently asked questions by people not yet familiar with self-service business intelligence tools.

- Collaborative sharing of your dashboards (Google Drive-style approach as opposed to MS Office)
– You can design clean and user-friendly design for your charts and dashboards
– Possibility to cross multiple datasources (for the moment XLS and CSV only, but soon web services and databases)
– You may publish information in one click on the web
– Easy to embed charts and dashboard on external websites
– Capable of handling big amounts of data (up to 1GB for the moment, and a lot more very soon)

Last, we at Jolicharts don’t see Microsoft Excel as a competitor at all. To us, Microsoft Excel is a wonderful platform to build upon, with a huge-issima installed based. We acknowledge a good chunk of our users are very familiar with Excel – some of them are Excel power users, and we’re doing our best everyday to make Excel datasources integrate seamlessly with Jolicharts. In a way, Jolicharts is the online, social extension of your spreadsheets.